Animus 4 (1999) www.swgc.mun.ca/animus 78 Neoplatonism And The Origin Of The Cartesian Subject James A Doull [email protected] Introduction Hegel, beginning his lectures on the history of the older modern philosophy, observed that that philosophy began where the ancient had ended: the new philosophy had its origin in a completion of the old. This completion he found in Neoplatonism: the divine self-consciousness which was for Aristotle the first among substances became in the full development of Neoplatonism the one comprehensive substance which, going into the division of an ideal and a sensible world, was at once the origin of that division and the end to which it returned. The appropriation of being by thought which began with Parmenides was complete. The present paper would clarify the development of Neoplatonism to that completion and the transition at that point to another philosophy. The difference of the old philosophy from the new was that the one was about the Idea the divine actuality on which all things depended the other about Spirit the revelation of the absolute unity itself. The absolute freedom of the Idea is not merely that it passes over into life nor as finite knowledge lets that difference appear in itself, but in the absolute truth of itself [that is, as returned to itself out of this division] freely releases the moment of its otherness as nature. 1 The rational individual in this relation to the divine freedom and to a nature opposed to itself is the subject which comprises its difference in its self-relation. The primary structure of Neoplatonism is transformed in this transition. Being and thinking (noeton and noesis) are not mediated by this procession and sensible appearance of the orders of nature, but thinking mediates the relation of a creative divine freedom with a created world to which was imparted in the medium of time and extension an apparent independence. With this altered relation of the primary moments it is no longer true, as for Proclus, that "every manifold is posterior to the One." The knowledge beyond 1 Hegel, Enzyklopadie der philosophischen wissenschaften (1830), 44. Hegel speaks of the transition from the return of all finitude to the freedom of the One to where the finite is for a free Cartesian (or Augustinian) subject from the standpoint of a logic which has taken into itself also this older modern relation. Descartes (or Augustine) rather finds himself in this new philosophical beginning than has hold of the logic of the transition.
Neoplatonism And The Origin Of The Cartesian Subject
Apr 05, 2023
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doull4James A Doull [email protected]
Introduction
Hegel, beginning his lectures on the history of the older modern philosophy, observed that that philosophy began where the ancient had ended: the new philosophy had its origin in a completion of the old. This completion he found in Neoplatonism: the divine self-consciousness which was for Aristotle the first among substances became in the full development of Neoplatonism the one comprehensive substance which, going into the division of an ideal and a sensible world, was at once the origin of that division and the end to which it returned. The appropriation of being by thought which began with Parmenides was complete. The present paper would clarify the development of Neoplatonism to that completion and the transition at that point to another philosophy.
The difference of the old philosophy from the new was that the one was about the Idea the divine actuality on which all things depended the other about Spirit the revelation of the absolute unity itself.
The absolute freedom of the Idea is not merely that it passes over into life nor as finite knowledge lets that difference appear in itself, but in the absolute truth of itself [that is, as returned to itself out of this division] freely releases the moment of its otherness as nature. 1
The rational individual in this relation to the divine freedom and to a nature opposed to itself is the subject which comprises its difference in its self-relation.
The primary structure of Neoplatonism is transformed in this transition. Being and thinking (noeton and noesis) are not mediated by this procession and sensible appearance of the orders of nature, but thinking mediates the relation of a creative divine freedom with a created world to which was imparted in the medium of time and extension an apparent independence. With this altered relation of the primary moments it is no longer true, as for Proclus, that "every manifold is posterior to the One." The knowledge beyond 1 Hegel, Enzyklopadie der philosophischen wissenschaften (1830), 44. Hegel speaks of the transition from the return of all finitude to the freedom of the One to where the finite is for a free Cartesian (or Augustinian) subject from the standpoint of a logic which has taken into itself also this older modern relation. Descartes (or Augustine) rather finds himself in this new philosophical beginning than has hold of the logic of the transition.
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knowledge of the One and the discursive knowledge of a plurality this side of the One have no longer a gulf between them but are elements of a knowledge at once immediate and mediated.
Man in this new philosophy is a self-consciousness which knows the division of the finite as its own.2 Radically opposed to an extended world, its inner freedom externalized, it is also drawn to that apparently alien world and finds a realization of its freedom in discovering its hidden ideality. Hence an insatiable scientific and technical interest, which while it may distract from the knowledge of God and freedom, is also a way to that knowledge.
The difference of the Neoplatonic from the older modern world is evident where individual freedom and a unified objective end meet in a political community. The highest political realization of a Neoplatonic thought is the unified state of the ending Middle Age. Individual freedom is ordered under a sovereign will. In relation to the sovereignty individuals have an intuition of their primary freedom. The ordered relation of their finite interests to this primary end is sustained by the opposition of an aristocratic or universal class to the class of those in commerce and the trades, however much the interests of the two may interpenetrate. The ruinous consequences when the sovereign fails to maintain his priority or when private persons would usurp the monarchy, where the relation of commoner to aristocrat degenerates into unbounded hatred can nowhere be studied better than in well known Shakespearean tragedies. The most complete breakdown of the ordered elements is perhaps where Hamlet has the obligation to restore a corrupted monarchy, is destroyed with many in the contradiction of being at once sovereign and subordinate.3
2 The Neoplatonic noetic thought knows the finite as belonging to self-consciousness, but to a self- consciousness itself composite of the divided and the undivided, and having its freedom beyond this relation. For the Cartesian subject a true knowledge of the finite is consequent on its relation to the divine freedom. Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophiae, V: "Etsi enim ejus sim naturae ut, quamdiu aliquid valde clare et distincte percipio, non possim non credere verum esse, quia tamen ejus etiam sum naturae ut non possim obtutum mentis in eandem rem semper defigere ad illam clare percipiendam, recurratque saepe memoria judicii ante facti, cum non amplius attendo ad rationes propter quas tale quid judicavi, rationes aliae afferri possunt quae me, si Deum ignorarem, facile ab opinione dejicerent, atque ita de nulla un quam re veram & certam scientiam, se vagas tantum & mutabiles opiniones, haberem." (AT, vii, 69). Augustine's criticism of a Porphyrian Neoplatonism, from which he has received great enlightenment, is that it does not in this way stabilize his relation to the sensible world: "...invisibilia tua per ea quae sunt intellecta conspexi, sed aciem figere non evalui et repercussa infirmitate redditus solitis non mecum ferebam nisi amantem memoriam [i.e. not 'scientiam'] ... " Conf., VII, xvii. 3 Aquinas proposed to define the relation of individuals to the state through the virtues of the Nicomachean Ethics. The virtues, as belonging to the free individual or person, could however only hold their ground against evil passions within a Roman structure of hell and purgatory and subjected thus to an ideal unity of interests in a sovereign will a structure elaborated in the Divina Commedia and other works of the poet. In the Renaissance state the virtuous and the self-seeking will are harmonized in relation to the sovereign: the virtuous knight has become the 'conquistador' or the like. When this harmony is destroyed, as by the murder of a king, the attempted restoration by particular wills exposes their nullity and that the state is in truth the one sovereign will. That the state is the sovereign is at the historical level the completed demonstration of the Neoplatonic principle: the unity is not only before the division, but contains within it the division and the negation of the division in the recognized supremacy of the monarchy.
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The free subject of the older modern age, as having the division within his freedom, is himself sovereign and with other constitutes a civil society a state within the state. The external state of Locke or Rousseau has not for its end to replace the state but to make the unified end of the state also the end of all its members.4
It can be useful to the argument to notice the difference of both the Neoplatonic and the older modern freedom from the contemporary freedom where individuals in their particularity would found all authority and institutional order on their prior rights. Communities acceptable to this freedom are either rooted in language and other natural particularities linguistic and cultural communities or must satisfy the boundless passions of individuals through a global economy. In this contemporary freedom the eternal appears to be more deeply historicized than ever in previous ages. Being is declared to be time, and time whose moments are concretized, fortified thus against a resurgent eternity. This temporalized freedom was however menaced for Heidegger by the abstract logic of the global economy which broke through a natural basis of thought in language. Its stability depends in truth, as analogously in the Hellenistic age, on a division into opposed dogmas.5
So much at this point for the moderns. The immediate antecedent of Neoplatonism was of course the Hellenistic world, where individuals thought to find freedom within the bounds of time and change. Plato and Aristotle, bringing to light the intelligible world on which the polis rested, had discovered in thought a coincidence of the objective good and individual freedom. Then, as for us in recent times, this result appeared to be the immediate possession of individuals and the objective pole a Heraclitean or Democritean world of change. In a clarified relation of self-consciousness to the totality of 'becoming' or 'becoming atomized' individuals thought to have an untroubled freedom (ataraxia). On the basis of that primary relation they thought also to have as truly their own the finite content of their world.
The free individual or person appropriated his world either in the immediacy of pleasure or universally in a comprehended imagination. Against these dogmatic haireseis, which have analogies in concreter form in our world, the Sceptic sought freedom in an undivided relation to the world of becoming. In that total view the opposed dogmas of the Stoic and Epicurean collapsed and the individual was virtually freed from his temporal cave. That being is time is the view of a divided self-consciousness, and the division once shown to be without truth, the individual goes into himself and would find a true consciousness of his freedom in an intelligible world.
The individual in this way returns to the origin of his freedom as set forth in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. His relation to those philosophies is not that of those who 4 An end which of course was clear neither to Locke nor Rousseau who remained with a subjective liberation. The relation of such an individual freedom to a unified political end is only partially disclosed in the 'enlightened' institutions of the United States. 5 Without a criticism of the divided philosophical culture of the present time Neoplatonism can appear deceptively close to the contemporary spirit: P. Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus, I, 492-3; J. Combès, Études Néoplatoniciennes, 35-60. For want of a sufficient criticism J. N. Findlay, having escaped the contemporary 'Cave' to Neoplatonism, fell into the more difficult 'Cave' of Hinduism.
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sought to bring the sensible world within the grasp of thought and then discerned beyond it a realm of separate spirits. Already in his superseded dogmas the free individual thought to have the categorized sensible world within his primary self-relation. Returned to the intelligible realm he found the ideas within thought. Plato was read as having this knowledge and as desiring beyond it relation to an absolute One. The One as self- consciousness beyond the division of noeton and noesis and as absolute good beyond finite relations was Aristotelian and not Platonic, the Aristotelian God as the point of unity before division, where the individual had contact with the ground of his freedom. The unified temporal world which had gone over to an eternal world had now the status of a derivative image.6
The three hypostases or totalities which made up the Neoplatonic world were at first only loosely articulated. If one suppose the complete articulation to be that found in Eriugena, where the ideal and sensible worlds have the simple structure of a division and return of the One, Plotinus by this measure is only at the beginning of a development. It was contained in the conversion from a unified sensible world to the intelligible, that the relation of the two worlds should not be abstract, as where the individual remains in the ideal world and only some part of himself descends reluctantly to a sensible embodiment. For the descent to be concrete the intelligible world must first be unified, the moment of division and difference in it made adequate to the 'noetic' and 'noeric' poles and they to each other. The One, as the origin of what comes after it, while remaining free of finite division must have that status for thought as comprehensive of the intelligible and sensible totalities.
The history of Neoplatonism is not of the different interests of one philosopher from another, that one is more purely philosophical, another more pious and devoted to the gods, but is the logical development of the one systematic structure. The development can only come to rest where the integrated individual knows his freedom as resting on a unified relation of the two worlds to the One.7
The Neoplatonists had themselves an objective measure of the progressive movement of their thought in the Parmenides of Plato, as in their commentaries they succeeded one farther than another in explaining the order and connection of its 'hypotheses'. It is no great matter that the dialogue was diverted from its original intention of showing how the relation of sensibles and separate ideas depended on a synthesis of the one and the indefinite dyad regarded affirmatively and then negatively. The dialogue taken to be about the One and the noetic world and their sensible image could not be fully explicated until the relation of these totalities had been given the form of a unified divine self- thinking. The history is near to completion when Damascius, extending his commentary 6 Unless through composition with the Dyad the Platonic 'One' is an abstraction and not properly the 'good': Philebus 65a-67b. The 'demiourgos' who fashions an image of the ideal world is mythical and not conceptually defined in Timaeus. If after Aristotle's destruction of the assumption that the concrete and actual can be from a composition of contraries (Met., N,2), Neoplatonists speak of what is after the One as 'composite' this Platonic language serves, if inappropriately, to speak of principles concrete and actual drawn from Aristotle. 7 On the deepening understanding of Neoplatonism after Plotinus, Dodds, Proclus, Elements of Theology (1932), XVIII-XXVI, compared with Trouillard on Proclus in Combès, Ét. Néopl. (1989), 308ff.
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to the negative hypotheses, discovers a unified relation of the sensible world to the intelligible, as already when the second hypothesis in his comment is found hardly other than the incomprehensible division of the One itself.8
One further point in this preliminary statement: something of the Aristotelian noesis noeseos eludes this return to it from the temporal freedom of the Hellenistic sects. Aristotle speaks of a divine thinking where what is divine is not so much divine because it is absolutely one as because it is the active nous which having all the intelligible in its possession is the actuality of that unity itself. There is in this concept, to speak theologically, an equality of persons and not a primacy of the paternal or substantial. Thus if Neoplatonism is for Hegel a realization of the Aristotelian idea it prepares also for the disclosure in another philosophy of what more that idea contains.9
It remains to follow the course of this argument more precisely. Its natural division is the following:
(a) The origin of the free individual and the temporalized Hellenistic world.
(b) The logic of the conversion of this temporal freedom to the eternal.
(c) The logical development of Neoplatonism.
(d) The origin in it of the older modern philosophy.
A) The Hellenic Origin Of The Hellenistic Philosophy
Hegel's history of Neoplatonism as the process by which all finitude is known to have its truth in the Aristotelian noesis noeseos is difficult from the comprehensiveness of its view. It looks back not only to the Hellenistic schools as the immediate antecedent of Neoplatonism but to the origin of that subjective culture in the older Greek world. The free individual or person, emerging from the substantial life of the polis and its gods, found first a temporal realization of its freedom in relation to a temporalized and materialized logos and then from an apparent and contradictory freedom sought and discovered its ground in an eternal logos.10
8 See 'Damascius', infra. 9 The One of the Neoplatonists as also the Good is pure act. This concept is presupposed without insight into its structure. What Aristotle says at Met XII, 7, of the divine activity is taken to be true at the noetic level. How Aristotle could speak more definitely but not mythically also of the first god can be explained historically and is more evident to the standpoint of the older modern philosophy which knows the undivided and the divided as complementary. 10 This circuitous route corrects a tendency to find too direct a kinship between contemporary subjective freedom and Neoplatonism. The freedom which finds its substantial end in Neoplatonism is that of the 'person' or rational individual of Hellenistic-Roman culture, who is free from his world but does not expect, as in all contemporary doctrine of rights, that it serve and satisfy him in his particularity. The intelligible
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In this return the Neoplatonists read Plato and Aristotle as though containing already the subjective freedom of the following age. The problems of the previous age and its philosophies fell outside their interest. This longer perspective has the advantage that it permits not only a comprehensive view of Neoplatonism and its intrinsic movement but also its limit, if there is that in Plato and Aristotle which Neoplatonism does not contain but became the interest of later philosophy.11
The subjective spirit of the Sophists and of the Socratic schools for Plato and Aristotle could either be contained within the qualified freedom of the political community or directed to its true development in a 'theoretic life'. The 'virtuous' relation of the individual to the state was a practical freedom which harmonized the passions to the common good. It belonged to the 'theoretic life' to discover a radical unity of life and thought. The free individual of the Hellenistic schools had supposedly brought all division and particularity to rest in an untroubled self-relation (ataraxia).12
The reader of Eumenides knows that the stability of the polis rested on a harmony between the gods of the state and those of the family or natural community. The individual stood in a divided relation to the underworld and to the Olympians. The unconscious potentiality of the one was his end as mortal. In relation to the Olympians he participated in the immortal life of the gods, in whom for a poetical vision life and self- conscious freedom were united. An ordered human life was made possible by a reason which could hold in check the latent conflict of these opposed ends.
The virtuous balance is easily destroyed by war "which mostly assimilates the disposition of men to their immediate circumstances."13 The resolution of this division at its extreme point also became the interest of tragedy. Oedipus is shown as learning the blindness of political reason in relation to natural particularity. He is then shown also as liberated from the vengeful passions of the natural will, and in relation to his sons and daughter from the opposed ends of family and state. The unity of these ends which is brought into view in these and other Sophoclean tragedies is not that of the Aristophanic comedy where the individual is raised to a self-conscious freedom in relation to the opposed ends of family and state and their gods. The tragic unification is rather that of the Aristotelian god for whom life is the actuality of self-conscious freedom, not in the
basis of this freedom is to be sought not only in Neoplatonism but also in the older modern philosophy. Both philosophies are necessary to a correction of contemporary dogmas. 11 In particular there occurred in the discovery of the categories of a finite reflection in Plato and Aristotle a dialectical relation of affirmative and negative moments for which there was hardly place in a Neoplatonic separation of divided…
Introduction
Hegel, beginning his lectures on the history of the older modern philosophy, observed that that philosophy began where the ancient had ended: the new philosophy had its origin in a completion of the old. This completion he found in Neoplatonism: the divine self-consciousness which was for Aristotle the first among substances became in the full development of Neoplatonism the one comprehensive substance which, going into the division of an ideal and a sensible world, was at once the origin of that division and the end to which it returned. The appropriation of being by thought which began with Parmenides was complete. The present paper would clarify the development of Neoplatonism to that completion and the transition at that point to another philosophy.
The difference of the old philosophy from the new was that the one was about the Idea the divine actuality on which all things depended the other about Spirit the revelation of the absolute unity itself.
The absolute freedom of the Idea is not merely that it passes over into life nor as finite knowledge lets that difference appear in itself, but in the absolute truth of itself [that is, as returned to itself out of this division] freely releases the moment of its otherness as nature. 1
The rational individual in this relation to the divine freedom and to a nature opposed to itself is the subject which comprises its difference in its self-relation.
The primary structure of Neoplatonism is transformed in this transition. Being and thinking (noeton and noesis) are not mediated by this procession and sensible appearance of the orders of nature, but thinking mediates the relation of a creative divine freedom with a created world to which was imparted in the medium of time and extension an apparent independence. With this altered relation of the primary moments it is no longer true, as for Proclus, that "every manifold is posterior to the One." The knowledge beyond 1 Hegel, Enzyklopadie der philosophischen wissenschaften (1830), 44. Hegel speaks of the transition from the return of all finitude to the freedom of the One to where the finite is for a free Cartesian (or Augustinian) subject from the standpoint of a logic which has taken into itself also this older modern relation. Descartes (or Augustine) rather finds himself in this new philosophical beginning than has hold of the logic of the transition.
DOULL: NEOPLATONISM AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CARTESIAN SUBJECT
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knowledge of the One and the discursive knowledge of a plurality this side of the One have no longer a gulf between them but are elements of a knowledge at once immediate and mediated.
Man in this new philosophy is a self-consciousness which knows the division of the finite as its own.2 Radically opposed to an extended world, its inner freedom externalized, it is also drawn to that apparently alien world and finds a realization of its freedom in discovering its hidden ideality. Hence an insatiable scientific and technical interest, which while it may distract from the knowledge of God and freedom, is also a way to that knowledge.
The difference of the Neoplatonic from the older modern world is evident where individual freedom and a unified objective end meet in a political community. The highest political realization of a Neoplatonic thought is the unified state of the ending Middle Age. Individual freedom is ordered under a sovereign will. In relation to the sovereignty individuals have an intuition of their primary freedom. The ordered relation of their finite interests to this primary end is sustained by the opposition of an aristocratic or universal class to the class of those in commerce and the trades, however much the interests of the two may interpenetrate. The ruinous consequences when the sovereign fails to maintain his priority or when private persons would usurp the monarchy, where the relation of commoner to aristocrat degenerates into unbounded hatred can nowhere be studied better than in well known Shakespearean tragedies. The most complete breakdown of the ordered elements is perhaps where Hamlet has the obligation to restore a corrupted monarchy, is destroyed with many in the contradiction of being at once sovereign and subordinate.3
2 The Neoplatonic noetic thought knows the finite as belonging to self-consciousness, but to a self- consciousness itself composite of the divided and the undivided, and having its freedom beyond this relation. For the Cartesian subject a true knowledge of the finite is consequent on its relation to the divine freedom. Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophiae, V: "Etsi enim ejus sim naturae ut, quamdiu aliquid valde clare et distincte percipio, non possim non credere verum esse, quia tamen ejus etiam sum naturae ut non possim obtutum mentis in eandem rem semper defigere ad illam clare percipiendam, recurratque saepe memoria judicii ante facti, cum non amplius attendo ad rationes propter quas tale quid judicavi, rationes aliae afferri possunt quae me, si Deum ignorarem, facile ab opinione dejicerent, atque ita de nulla un quam re veram & certam scientiam, se vagas tantum & mutabiles opiniones, haberem." (AT, vii, 69). Augustine's criticism of a Porphyrian Neoplatonism, from which he has received great enlightenment, is that it does not in this way stabilize his relation to the sensible world: "...invisibilia tua per ea quae sunt intellecta conspexi, sed aciem figere non evalui et repercussa infirmitate redditus solitis non mecum ferebam nisi amantem memoriam [i.e. not 'scientiam'] ... " Conf., VII, xvii. 3 Aquinas proposed to define the relation of individuals to the state through the virtues of the Nicomachean Ethics. The virtues, as belonging to the free individual or person, could however only hold their ground against evil passions within a Roman structure of hell and purgatory and subjected thus to an ideal unity of interests in a sovereign will a structure elaborated in the Divina Commedia and other works of the poet. In the Renaissance state the virtuous and the self-seeking will are harmonized in relation to the sovereign: the virtuous knight has become the 'conquistador' or the like. When this harmony is destroyed, as by the murder of a king, the attempted restoration by particular wills exposes their nullity and that the state is in truth the one sovereign will. That the state is the sovereign is at the historical level the completed demonstration of the Neoplatonic principle: the unity is not only before the division, but contains within it the division and the negation of the division in the recognized supremacy of the monarchy.
DOULL: NEOPLATONISM AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CARTESIAN SUBJECT
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The free subject of the older modern age, as having the division within his freedom, is himself sovereign and with other constitutes a civil society a state within the state. The external state of Locke or Rousseau has not for its end to replace the state but to make the unified end of the state also the end of all its members.4
It can be useful to the argument to notice the difference of both the Neoplatonic and the older modern freedom from the contemporary freedom where individuals in their particularity would found all authority and institutional order on their prior rights. Communities acceptable to this freedom are either rooted in language and other natural particularities linguistic and cultural communities or must satisfy the boundless passions of individuals through a global economy. In this contemporary freedom the eternal appears to be more deeply historicized than ever in previous ages. Being is declared to be time, and time whose moments are concretized, fortified thus against a resurgent eternity. This temporalized freedom was however menaced for Heidegger by the abstract logic of the global economy which broke through a natural basis of thought in language. Its stability depends in truth, as analogously in the Hellenistic age, on a division into opposed dogmas.5
So much at this point for the moderns. The immediate antecedent of Neoplatonism was of course the Hellenistic world, where individuals thought to find freedom within the bounds of time and change. Plato and Aristotle, bringing to light the intelligible world on which the polis rested, had discovered in thought a coincidence of the objective good and individual freedom. Then, as for us in recent times, this result appeared to be the immediate possession of individuals and the objective pole a Heraclitean or Democritean world of change. In a clarified relation of self-consciousness to the totality of 'becoming' or 'becoming atomized' individuals thought to have an untroubled freedom (ataraxia). On the basis of that primary relation they thought also to have as truly their own the finite content of their world.
The free individual or person appropriated his world either in the immediacy of pleasure or universally in a comprehended imagination. Against these dogmatic haireseis, which have analogies in concreter form in our world, the Sceptic sought freedom in an undivided relation to the world of becoming. In that total view the opposed dogmas of the Stoic and Epicurean collapsed and the individual was virtually freed from his temporal cave. That being is time is the view of a divided self-consciousness, and the division once shown to be without truth, the individual goes into himself and would find a true consciousness of his freedom in an intelligible world.
The individual in this way returns to the origin of his freedom as set forth in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. His relation to those philosophies is not that of those who 4 An end which of course was clear neither to Locke nor Rousseau who remained with a subjective liberation. The relation of such an individual freedom to a unified political end is only partially disclosed in the 'enlightened' institutions of the United States. 5 Without a criticism of the divided philosophical culture of the present time Neoplatonism can appear deceptively close to the contemporary spirit: P. Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus, I, 492-3; J. Combès, Études Néoplatoniciennes, 35-60. For want of a sufficient criticism J. N. Findlay, having escaped the contemporary 'Cave' to Neoplatonism, fell into the more difficult 'Cave' of Hinduism.
DOULL: NEOPLATONISM AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CARTESIAN SUBJECT
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sought to bring the sensible world within the grasp of thought and then discerned beyond it a realm of separate spirits. Already in his superseded dogmas the free individual thought to have the categorized sensible world within his primary self-relation. Returned to the intelligible realm he found the ideas within thought. Plato was read as having this knowledge and as desiring beyond it relation to an absolute One. The One as self- consciousness beyond the division of noeton and noesis and as absolute good beyond finite relations was Aristotelian and not Platonic, the Aristotelian God as the point of unity before division, where the individual had contact with the ground of his freedom. The unified temporal world which had gone over to an eternal world had now the status of a derivative image.6
The three hypostases or totalities which made up the Neoplatonic world were at first only loosely articulated. If one suppose the complete articulation to be that found in Eriugena, where the ideal and sensible worlds have the simple structure of a division and return of the One, Plotinus by this measure is only at the beginning of a development. It was contained in the conversion from a unified sensible world to the intelligible, that the relation of the two worlds should not be abstract, as where the individual remains in the ideal world and only some part of himself descends reluctantly to a sensible embodiment. For the descent to be concrete the intelligible world must first be unified, the moment of division and difference in it made adequate to the 'noetic' and 'noeric' poles and they to each other. The One, as the origin of what comes after it, while remaining free of finite division must have that status for thought as comprehensive of the intelligible and sensible totalities.
The history of Neoplatonism is not of the different interests of one philosopher from another, that one is more purely philosophical, another more pious and devoted to the gods, but is the logical development of the one systematic structure. The development can only come to rest where the integrated individual knows his freedom as resting on a unified relation of the two worlds to the One.7
The Neoplatonists had themselves an objective measure of the progressive movement of their thought in the Parmenides of Plato, as in their commentaries they succeeded one farther than another in explaining the order and connection of its 'hypotheses'. It is no great matter that the dialogue was diverted from its original intention of showing how the relation of sensibles and separate ideas depended on a synthesis of the one and the indefinite dyad regarded affirmatively and then negatively. The dialogue taken to be about the One and the noetic world and their sensible image could not be fully explicated until the relation of these totalities had been given the form of a unified divine self- thinking. The history is near to completion when Damascius, extending his commentary 6 Unless through composition with the Dyad the Platonic 'One' is an abstraction and not properly the 'good': Philebus 65a-67b. The 'demiourgos' who fashions an image of the ideal world is mythical and not conceptually defined in Timaeus. If after Aristotle's destruction of the assumption that the concrete and actual can be from a composition of contraries (Met., N,2), Neoplatonists speak of what is after the One as 'composite' this Platonic language serves, if inappropriately, to speak of principles concrete and actual drawn from Aristotle. 7 On the deepening understanding of Neoplatonism after Plotinus, Dodds, Proclus, Elements of Theology (1932), XVIII-XXVI, compared with Trouillard on Proclus in Combès, Ét. Néopl. (1989), 308ff.
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to the negative hypotheses, discovers a unified relation of the sensible world to the intelligible, as already when the second hypothesis in his comment is found hardly other than the incomprehensible division of the One itself.8
One further point in this preliminary statement: something of the Aristotelian noesis noeseos eludes this return to it from the temporal freedom of the Hellenistic sects. Aristotle speaks of a divine thinking where what is divine is not so much divine because it is absolutely one as because it is the active nous which having all the intelligible in its possession is the actuality of that unity itself. There is in this concept, to speak theologically, an equality of persons and not a primacy of the paternal or substantial. Thus if Neoplatonism is for Hegel a realization of the Aristotelian idea it prepares also for the disclosure in another philosophy of what more that idea contains.9
It remains to follow the course of this argument more precisely. Its natural division is the following:
(a) The origin of the free individual and the temporalized Hellenistic world.
(b) The logic of the conversion of this temporal freedom to the eternal.
(c) The logical development of Neoplatonism.
(d) The origin in it of the older modern philosophy.
A) The Hellenic Origin Of The Hellenistic Philosophy
Hegel's history of Neoplatonism as the process by which all finitude is known to have its truth in the Aristotelian noesis noeseos is difficult from the comprehensiveness of its view. It looks back not only to the Hellenistic schools as the immediate antecedent of Neoplatonism but to the origin of that subjective culture in the older Greek world. The free individual or person, emerging from the substantial life of the polis and its gods, found first a temporal realization of its freedom in relation to a temporalized and materialized logos and then from an apparent and contradictory freedom sought and discovered its ground in an eternal logos.10
8 See 'Damascius', infra. 9 The One of the Neoplatonists as also the Good is pure act. This concept is presupposed without insight into its structure. What Aristotle says at Met XII, 7, of the divine activity is taken to be true at the noetic level. How Aristotle could speak more definitely but not mythically also of the first god can be explained historically and is more evident to the standpoint of the older modern philosophy which knows the undivided and the divided as complementary. 10 This circuitous route corrects a tendency to find too direct a kinship between contemporary subjective freedom and Neoplatonism. The freedom which finds its substantial end in Neoplatonism is that of the 'person' or rational individual of Hellenistic-Roman culture, who is free from his world but does not expect, as in all contemporary doctrine of rights, that it serve and satisfy him in his particularity. The intelligible
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In this return the Neoplatonists read Plato and Aristotle as though containing already the subjective freedom of the following age. The problems of the previous age and its philosophies fell outside their interest. This longer perspective has the advantage that it permits not only a comprehensive view of Neoplatonism and its intrinsic movement but also its limit, if there is that in Plato and Aristotle which Neoplatonism does not contain but became the interest of later philosophy.11
The subjective spirit of the Sophists and of the Socratic schools for Plato and Aristotle could either be contained within the qualified freedom of the political community or directed to its true development in a 'theoretic life'. The 'virtuous' relation of the individual to the state was a practical freedom which harmonized the passions to the common good. It belonged to the 'theoretic life' to discover a radical unity of life and thought. The free individual of the Hellenistic schools had supposedly brought all division and particularity to rest in an untroubled self-relation (ataraxia).12
The reader of Eumenides knows that the stability of the polis rested on a harmony between the gods of the state and those of the family or natural community. The individual stood in a divided relation to the underworld and to the Olympians. The unconscious potentiality of the one was his end as mortal. In relation to the Olympians he participated in the immortal life of the gods, in whom for a poetical vision life and self- conscious freedom were united. An ordered human life was made possible by a reason which could hold in check the latent conflict of these opposed ends.
The virtuous balance is easily destroyed by war "which mostly assimilates the disposition of men to their immediate circumstances."13 The resolution of this division at its extreme point also became the interest of tragedy. Oedipus is shown as learning the blindness of political reason in relation to natural particularity. He is then shown also as liberated from the vengeful passions of the natural will, and in relation to his sons and daughter from the opposed ends of family and state. The unity of these ends which is brought into view in these and other Sophoclean tragedies is not that of the Aristophanic comedy where the individual is raised to a self-conscious freedom in relation to the opposed ends of family and state and their gods. The tragic unification is rather that of the Aristotelian god for whom life is the actuality of self-conscious freedom, not in the
basis of this freedom is to be sought not only in Neoplatonism but also in the older modern philosophy. Both philosophies are necessary to a correction of contemporary dogmas. 11 In particular there occurred in the discovery of the categories of a finite reflection in Plato and Aristotle a dialectical relation of affirmative and negative moments for which there was hardly place in a Neoplatonic separation of divided…
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